ASUS ROG ARES III: 8GB Dual GPU monster

After turbo charging the two Tahiti and making its debut as world’s fastest Dual GPU card, ARES II is now succeeded by the ARES III incorporating two monstrous Hawaii GPUs.

Short note on Ares Lineage

Ares II : Hybrid cooling

Since, Republic of Gamers is a very renowned name in the gaming component industry, therefore the engineers at Asus tek® always try to push further their own records for developing the fastest Graphic Cards on the planet. ROG Mars is reserved for Dual GPU behemoths from NVIDIA which are custom made and is fully domestic engineered, while the ROG Ares tag is reserved for the AMD giants with two flagship GPUs in a single PCB and that also turbo clocked to its limits.

Here comes Ares III

Asus ROG Ares II : Package

Ares III will be the second card in Ares lineup to use GPUs based on Graphic Core Next GPU micro-architecture but this time it would break its own record by incorporating two Hawaii Chips rather than two Tahiti chips. The Hawaii chips used in R9 290 and R9 290X cards are a more complex and more hefty piece of silicon compared to Tahiti GPUs, and each chip sports 2816 SPs (Stream Processors) vs. 2048 on a single Tahiti. Not only that, the two Hawaii chips combine to produce a total of 5632 Stream Processors which is monstrous compared to 4096 on older Ares II and a mere 3072 on the GTX 690. The Dual Hawaii card might have 64 ROPs which is same as a single Hawaii or 2x 64 ROPs. The video memory is doubled to an impressive 8GB (compared to 6GB on Ares II & 7990) which would provide enough pixels to game at 4K trends with ease and may be channeled through 1 Kbit (2x 512 bit) wide bus seeing that the previous Ares (and 7990) utilized the benefits of both the GPUs making a total of 768 bit (2×384 bit)wide interface. According to Asus, this card was developed with the help of the AMD’s reference provided but since we don’t have any official report about AMD officially launching a Dual GPU card succeeding 7990 but this can be expected in Q2 this year. But Asus utilized the same custom PCB design like Ares II, since this card would require massive power regulations and efficient thermal managements and may use the same custom loop water cooling block pre-installed like Ares II. Since the information is not official and is only based on leaks therefore we don’t know the exact VRM design of Ares III but we can tell that since it uses same PCB as Ares II therefore may use the same 20 phase DIGI+ VRMs channeled via three 8pin connectors and may top the TDP over 500W with a PSU recommendation of 850 Watt with enough +12V Amperage and this type of power needs does mean massive over-clocks out of the box on both GPU and Memory clocks, but the exact numbers are not out.

Card Name

Ares III

Ares II

GTX 690

Stream Processors

2x 2816= 5632

2x 2048= 4096

2x 1536= 3072

ROPs

2x 64*(Approximation)

2x 32

2x 32

GPUs

2x Hawaii

2x Tahiti

2x GK104

VRAM

2x 4096= 8192 MB

2x 3072= 6144 MB

2x 2048= 4096 MB

Memory Bus

2x512bit= 1 Kbit*(approx)

2x 384bit= 768 bit

2x 256bit= 512 bit

Codenamed

Vesuvius

New Zealand

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Price

$1600-$2000

$1600

$1000

Waiting for the monster to unleash, officially

The chip is rumored to be codenamed Vesuvius just like the older Ares II was codenamed New Zealand, does Asus is trying to convey something by naming it after a strato volcano? We don’t have any idea about that since we only judge cards with their sheer performance and not catchy codenames, but this is for sure that this card would definitely be a breakthrough in GPU technology (Well, kind of “You don’t say?!” moment) but one more thing is for sure that a guy on a budget can’t buy this. Prices are expected to be above $1500 and is expected to launch at Computex 2014.

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